Tag: Groot Schuur Hospital

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A Humanist with an Unblinking gaze – Professor Ntobeko Ntusi Takes the Hot-seat at the South African Medical Research Council

On By ModernMedia
Professor Ntobeko Ntusi in front of a painting depicting student protests inside his office at Groote Schuur Hospital – the same office that once housed his mentor, the late Professor Bongani Mayosi. (Photo: Biénne Huisman/Spotlight)

Professor Ntobeko Ntusi may be softspoken, but he is not afraid to stand by his strongly held views. As he is set to take up the hot-seat at the country’s primary health research funder, he tells Spotlight’s Biénne Huisman about his background and his priorities for the new job.

Professor Ntobeko Ntusi’s bearing brings to mind the aphorism “speak softly and carry a big stick” cited by the 26th president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt.

Inside his office at Groote Schuur’s Old Main Building, department head of medicine at the hospital; Ntusi is soft spoken, his words a few decibels above a whisper. However his observations are thoughtful and sharp, crafted with precision. Known to call out issues around race and racism at South African universities – “inbuilt biases” even amongst young students – his level, unblinking gaze commands attention.

Born in Umthatha to academic parents, Ntusi at age 13 was named South African Junior Ballroom Dance Champion at an event in Sasolburg. Some three decades later, the cardiologist with qualifications from around the world, does not sidestep public healthcare debate in favour of keeping the peace.

Catastrophic budget cuts

Earlier this year, Ntusi publicly criticised healthcare budget cuts. R200 million was shaved off Groote Schuur’s coffers just last year, as the Western Cape Department of Health and Wellness announced an R807.8 million shortfall for the coming year. Speaking to Spotlight, Ntusi described communication on the matter by provincial government officials (with healthcare professionals) as “appalling”.

In February, Ntusi was one of a group of executives at the hospital – affiliated to the University of Cape Town (UCT) – who spearheaded a petition to national and provincial treasury, decrying “crippling austerity” and “catastrophic budget cuts”; saying how clinicians with multiplying work hours are watching patients deteriorate, as waiting lists for lifesaving elective surgery grow longer.

At a boardroom table inside his office, he says: “How we ration limited resources, this is causing real moral injury to our front-facing clinicians. I mean, we’re having to deal with complaints from patients who no longer have access to services they have grown accustomed to. This is causing a lot of distress, especially among young doctors, and medical registrars – the engine of our operation – who are increasingly anxious and taking time out for mental health reasons.”

In his present position, Ntusi’s voice has clout. He oversees thirteen divisions – from cardiology to pulmonology, and infectious diseases and HIV medicine – and corresponding research units such as the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre, directed by Professor Linda-Gail Bekker.

‘Hope cannot be a strategy’

Reflecting on how Groote Schuur’s management are responding to these challenges, Ntusi says the hospital’s CEO (since February) Shaheem de Vries, while new, in time ought to bring concrete priorities to the table. “It’s important to have hope, but hope cannot be a strategy,” he says.

This insight may well inform how he approaches his own new job as CEO and President of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), taking over from Professor Glenda Gray. From July, Ntusi will give up his Groote Schuur office, putting away his clinician’s stethoscope, to take up the hot-seat at the country’s primary health research funder at its headquarters behind a facebrick facade in Parow. The SAMRC employs 718 employees and will see Ntusi answer to the National Department of Health, the SAMRC board, and the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health (you can see the latest report to the committee here).

Across medical bureaucracies, budget remains an issue. The South African government allocated R1.35 billion to the SAMRC for 2023/24. In the council’s latest annual report, diminishing funding from government is listed as a threat; while the ability to attract external funding is listed as a strength.

“A key role of the President of the SAMRC is to engage with organisations like the Wellcome Trust [in the United Kingdom] and the NIH [the National Institutes of Health in the United States] and high worth individuals to attract funding,” says Ntusi.

He points out that the SAMRC has had clean audits for several years running – a remarkable achievement for a South African parastatal. Indeed, the council’s annual performance plan for 2024/2025 states: “Despite interruptions of COVID-19, SAMRC’s exemplary performance and good governance led to the organisation achieving four consecutive clean audits… It is the organisation’s intention to continue on the same path.”

On the SAMRC’s functions, Ntusi explains: “For government, the SAMRC plays a critical role in bridging the gap between strategy and policy, and implementation. In science, it plays a critical role in providing priorities for the funding of research, and capacity building…”

In the SAMRC’s last financial year, R61.6 million was allocated to funding 171 “research capacity development” grants, including 120 to women. The annual report describes this as funding “the next generation of health researchers… with most of these awards aimed at individuals from historically disadvantaged backgrounds.”

For Ntusi, points of focus to be expanded on at the SAMRC include health issues relating to climate or planetary change, epidemic preparedness, “restoring trust in science in an age of misinformation”, digital health and artificial intelligence; and projects linking South African scholars with research entities across Africa. “In many of these countries, they don’t have the research infrastructure and budgets we have in South Africa – it is important to assist them with projects.”

To the US and back home

When he was 14, Ntusi’s family – he is one of three boys – moved to the United States where his mother pursued a PhD in social work. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he continued competitive ballroom dancing while attending Lower Merion High School, where a video on child birth showed in a biology class stirred his passions.

At liberal arts college Haverford, in Pennsylvania, he completed a BSc Honours in cellular and molecular biology, before returning “home” to South Africa in 1999, to enrol in medical school at UCT. Here his initial interest in obstetrics was disappointed – “it was loud and messy, an anti-climax” – seeing him drawn to internal medicine and cardiology instead. In following years, he would study cardiovascular medicine under mentorship of the late Professor Bongani Mayosi.

Like Mayosi, Ntusi was awarded the Oxford Nuffield Medical Scholarship, which funded his D.Phil at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. His doctoral research looked at cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR – noninvasive tests that produce images of a beating heart) to study inflammatory heart disease.

In 2016, Ntusi took over from Mayosi as head of Groote Schuur’s department of medicine, as Mayosi became dean of the university’s faculty of health sciences. At the time Ntusi continued treating cardiology patients, with ongoing research projects including on HIV-related heart disease.

Seven years later, against pale yellow walls (the same walls decorated by Mayosi back when it was his office) several art works and certificates attest to Ntusi’s time here. He points out one painting of student protestors made by a friend – based on the #FeesMustFall protests at the university in 2016 – “a difficult time”, he says.

In 2018, Mayosi’s suicide was partially attributed by some to pressures relating to the violent protests; while also putting a spotlight on pressure on prominent black academics at UCT, and other tertiary institutions in South Africa. An enquiry found that the “sometimes disrespectful manner” in which protest was conducted, and “instigation of students’ action by some of his colleagues”, caused Mayosi “a lot of distress”.

Displayed on a shelf, beside a stuffed doll of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a 2021 SAMRC gold trophy for “scientific achievement”, a burgundy-bound book recounts Mayosi’s legacy. Ntusi penned the introduction, where he writes: “Bongani Mayosi – as a leader, he was awesome. He is one of the most inspiring people I will ever know. He always reminded me: ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a few steps’.”

Asked about following in the footsteps of a star such as Mayosi, Ntusi replies: “I am his protégée. There were always room for me to build my own scientific investigations.”

Precarious times

As Ntusi is poised to depart from Groote Schuur, present dean of UCT health sciences Associate Professor Lionel Green-Thompson points out how the cardiologist cared for critically ill patients in COVID-19 high-care wards, particularly during the fear and uncertainty of hard lockdown.

“Sometimes we would work up to 16 hour shifts in the high-care wards; upon finally leaving I’d go outside to find anti-vaccine protestors in front of the hospital. I mean, they were just annoying,” Ntusi recalls.

“Communication around the AstraZeneca vaccine went very badly – increasing confusion and vaccine hesitancy. It is really, really important to advocate for vaccines. And this brings me back to the point of restoring people’s faith in science; redressing the public image of science, a priority I have for the SAMRC going forward.” (After procuring the AstraZeneca SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, the South African government decided early in 2021 not to use it after it showed limited efficacy against mild to moderate COVID-19 in a study.)

Foremost, Ntusi describes himself as a “humanist”. Apart from science, medicine and health equity, his interests include art, wine and dogs. Ntusi lives in Milnerton. A keen runner, he is a member of the Gugulethu Athletics Club.

Republished from Spotlight under a Creative Commons licence.

Source: Spotlight

Categories : Healthcare Politics and Regulations HospitalsTags :

Officials Raise Alarm over Hiring Freeze at Western Cape’s Largest Hospitals

On By ModernMedia

By Daniel Steyn for GroundUp

Health workers at Groote Schuur Hospital and Red Cross Children’s Hospital in Cape Town are starting to feel the effects of an ongoing freeze on the hiring of critical medical staff.

According to senior officials at these hospitals, speaking to GroundUp anonymously, the situation has reached a point where managers are struggling to fill shift rosters. An impact on patient care and waiting times is inevitable, the officials say.

A senior hospital manager at Groote Schuur told GroundUp that almost half of medical officer (doctor) posts in the medicine department are vacant, in addition to hundreds of other nursing and operational posts. 

Another senior official at Red Cross Children’s Hospital told GroundUp that “critical medical posts” are being left vacant, including medical officer, registrar (doctors in training for a speciality), and specialist posts.

Groote Schuur Hospital is one of the largest government hospitals in the Western Cape and Red Cross Children’s Hospital is the largest children’s hospital in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Daily Maverick reported in November that the budget shortfall for these two hospitals amounts to more than R300-million for 2023/2024.

In addition to hiring freezes at Groote Schuur and Red Cross, the Western Cape Department of Health decided to de-escalate services at the hospitals for a period of four weeks over December and January. Hospital managers were also told to reduce spending on consumables by 50%, according to the Daily Maverick.

At the start of 2023, large cuts were made to the conditional grants that fund these hospitals. And then in the middle of the year, National Treasury announced significant austerity measures including a R21-billion reduction in national government spending for 2023/24.

In August last year, a letter by National Treasury to provincial governments recommended several “cost containment” measures for the 2023/24 financial year and suggested a freeze on hiring of new employees.

It appears that each province’s health department is dealing with the “cost containment” measures in different ways. In the Eastern Cape, for example, hiring freezes have been implemented but not for clinical staff, Sizwe Kupelo, spokesperson for that province’s health department, told GroundUp.

In the Western Cape, as of May 2022, the vacancy rate of medical posts was 5%, compared to 14% in the Eastern Cape, 20% in Gauteng and 28% in KwaZulu-Natal. Health experts are concerned that budget cuts and hiring freezes will have a devastating impact on these provinces.

Hospital officials at Groote Schuur and Red Cross told GroundUp that there has been a lack of clarity from the provincial department on how long hiring freezes will last and whether there will be a permanent reduction in medical posts.

Senior officials fear that the hiring freeze is undoing decades of investment by the government in the capacity of state hospitals. Newly graduated doctors looking to specialise need to take up a registrar post in a state facility, but with registrar posts frozen in the Western Cape, this is almost impossible for them to do.

Hospital managers told GroundUp that some medical officers have resigned from Western Cape hospitals to take up registrar posts in other provinces or even other countries.

Officials are also concerned that if hiring freezes are implemented in primary and secondary care facilities, referrals to hospitals will increase, putting further pressure on an already overburdened tertiary health system.

Dwayne Evans, spokesperson for the Western Cape Department of Health, told GroundUp that the department is unable to respond to specific questions on budget shortfalls or the number of posts frozen, as the 2024/25 budgets are being finalised.

Evans told GroundUp that as part of the hiring freeze, the filling of vacant posts now needs to be authorised by the provincial department to attain “provincial consensus”. 820 vacant nursing posts and 441 doctor positions have been “earmarked to be filled soon”, Evans said.

“We are doing everything we can to reduce the impact on our patients. No patients will be refused emergency and basic medical care and treatment,” he said.

The National Department of Health did not respond to GroundUp’s questions despite several follow-up attempts. National Treasury said that guidance will be given during the upcoming budget speech by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana.

Republished from GroundUp under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Source: GroundUp

Categories : Hospitals Surgeries & ProceduresTags : Leave a comment

Groote Schuur Hospital Clears Backlog of 1 500 Surgeries

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Quicknews

By Elri Voigt for Spotlight

Much of South Africa’s public health sector is plagued by long waiting times for surgery, a situation that was made much worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, an inspiring project at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town has reached the target of slashing its backlog by 1 500 elective surgeries – two months ahead of target.

At the end of March, a small team of healthcare workers completed the project called ‘Surgical Recovery’. The project ran from May 2022 and was originally planned to conclude 12 months later.

While this hasn’t cleared the entire backlog of people waiting for surgery at Groote Schuur, it has helped the hospital return to about the same waiting list level as it had before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Professor Lydia Cairncross, the head of general surgery at Groote Schuur. (Spotlight previously reported on the human cost of surgical waiting lists and on what could be done about it.)

The surgeries took place mainly in the E4 Surgical Day Ward at Groote Schuur. Cairncross explains that ward E4 was built as a Day Ward – meaning it handles surgeries where patients don’t require an overnight stay pre- or post-surgery – with the aim of increasing daycare surgery capacity for the hospital. And for the last 12 months, it has been the host of the Surgical Recovery Project.

E4 has 16 patient beds, four recovery beds, and two theatres, which were completed just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country. During the third wave of the pandemic, it was used as a COVID High Care Unit.

According to Dr Shrikant Peters, a public health specialist and the medical manager of theatre and ICU services at Groote Schuur, the hospital’s CEO Dr Bhavna Patel “had the foresight to request provincial use of COVID funding to develop the space as COVID High Care, and eventually to be used long-term as an Operating Suite and High Care Ward in line with prior hospital plans”.

The Surgical Recovery Project

By the end of the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Cairncross, there were discussions about how to catch up on the surgeries that had to be postponed because of COVID-19.

“The backlog in surgery comes on top of a pre-existing backlog. So, it’s not that the backlog was created by COVID, but it made it much, much, much worse,” she says, “In November 2021, we did an audit of how many patients were just physically waiting for surgery at the hospital. It was around 6 000 plus. We don’t actually have a baseline for pre-COVID, but we knew that we lost about 50% of our operating capacity,” Cairncross says.

“So, the idea was really to find a way to utilise this theatre space so that we could catch up with some of that backlog.”

From here, the Surgical Recovery Project for Groote Schuur was born with the ambitious target of performing 1 500 surgeries in 12 months.

Funds from the project came from three sources. Kristy Evans, head of the Groote Schuur Hospital Trust, tells Spotlight that fundraising for the project was kick-started by a R5 million donation from Gift of the Givers. The recently established Groote Schuur Hospital Trust focused on Surgical Recovery as their first project to fundraise for. An additional R1 million was raised by the Trust from over 500 corporate and private donors.

“People are always willing… [they] give what they can. We had donations from people who would transfer R10 into the account, sometimes people transfer R180 000,” Evans says.

She adds that the Project will continue into its second year, but the details regarding targets had not yet been finalised by the time of publication.

The Western Cape Provincial Department of Health also donated around R6.5 million to the project from their budget for surgical recovery post-COVID-19. According to Mark van der Heever, the provincial health spokesperson, this money was part of the R20 million that the department allocated to various surgical backlog recovery initiatives.

“[The] COVID-19 pandemic meant that elective surgical services had to be significantly de-escalated, as staff were deployed to COVID services, and this resulted in an increase in the backlog of operations. Hence, a specific practi[cal] plan to address this backlog in the short and long term has been developed,” says van der Heever. “Similar projects and initiatives across hospitals have already taken shape and also yielded success, such as at Karl Bremer Hospital, which also received a portion of the R20 million from the department. The hospital was able to perform an extra 328 procedures since August last year.”

Working around difficulties

At Groote Schuur, the project had to find a way to work around the difficulties of surgical catch-up. According to Cairncross, with any surgical catch-up, the challenges don’t just come from needing a physical space to operate in but also from having the appropriately trained staff. Not having enough trained staff in the public health sector, like theatre and surgery nurses, makes it hard to implement a surgical catch-up programme, even if there is money to do so.

To work around these difficulties, they came up with a centralised model for surgical recovery, where one theatre team of nurses could be employed on a contract rate for the 12 months. This team, led by Sister Melinda Davids, the nursing operations manager for the E4 theatre, would work Monday to Thursday in one of the E4 theatres and occasionally other theatres in the hospital for each of the 1 500 surgeries.

According to Cairncross, many surgeons, herself included, would come and operate on patients in addition to their normal surgeries and other duties. The funds, a total of about R 12.5 million, were used to pay the staff involved in the surgeries. The day-to-day operations were run by Davids and Peters.

According to Peters, the 1 500 operations occurred across all surgical specialities, ranging from cataract to cardiothoracic.

Success factors

Cairncross attributes the success of the project to the existing systems at Groote Schuur, supportive management, and the dedication of the surgical team and surgeons that gave their time to the project.

She says that because the hospital has a relatively functional system to start off with and a supportive management team, it allowed for “enough of a regulatory environment to keep things safe and above board but not to the extent where you can’t move”.

It was also about having the right person in charge of the team, she adds, gesturing to Davids.

Davids, who started her nursing career in 1989 and qualified as a theatre nurse in 2009, started working at Groote Schuur six years ago. She explains that the surgical team at E4 consisted of about 18 people. This includes herself, five scrub nurses, three anaesthetic nurses, three floor nurses, a registered nurse who assists in recovery, and a clerk. Peters adds that there are also two surgical medical officers and two anaesthetic registrars.

According to Davids, when the project started, several of the nurses had not worked in a theatre before so had to be trained and upskilled by her and some of the specialist nurses who make up the scrub nurse team. She also had to get creative about having the right equipment for each surgery, which sometimes meant she had to borrow equipment from other theatres.

“It’s been a challenge, but it’s a good challenge that’s kept me going,” she says. “We’re a good team.”

“Trust [in staff] has been fundamental to this,” says Peters, “I mean, the ability to trust junior staff to upskill themselves to become scrub nurses, to hand surgeons the right instrument when they asked for it. That’s been really heart-warming.”

‘Behind every number on the list is a patient’  

When asked why it was so important to do this kind of catch-up, Cairncross says the surgeries that were postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic were ones that weren’t urgent or emergent, but those patients who were bumped still struggled physically because of the delays.

“Behind every number on the list is a patient with a story of either progressive blindness, invasive skull tumours, or tumours around the auditory canal that result in hearing loss, chronic pain from joint problems and urinary retention with recurrent infections and admissions or having a stoma bag [a colostomy bag] with them for months longer than needed,” Cairncross says. “Heart-breaking stories and often these were the patients who kept getting cancelled [on]. They would come in and if something urgent would come up, they would be cancelled or the COVID wave would come.”

She adds that at the time when the idea for Surgical Recovery came about, the morale amongst the surgical teams was at a real low. Patients would be coming to the outpatient clinics and asking, for the umpteenth time, “when am I going to have my operation?” to which the healthcare workers had to keep responding that they don’t know.

“It’s just a terrible thing and so people [staff] started to feel disempowered and disillusioned and I really think that the project helped them to at least see some progress. That there were some changes or some shift in what they were dealing with,” Cairncross says. “It hasn’t cleared our entire backlog, and a once-off project will not do that, but it has reset us pretty close to where we were pre-COVID-19.”

Peters adds that while the backlogs haven’t been fully cleared, “for every case that we’ve done in the project, it’s someone off of a waiting list”.

Health system at a ‘precipice’

While the COVID-19 pandemic caused many surgeries to be postponed and added tremendously to surgical waiting lists, it isn’t the only factor contributing to backlogs. According to Peters, the issue of a shrinking health budget for tertiary services is and will continue to add to the existing backlogs across the country.

“There’s this building backlog coming up against the shrinking budget. And that’s going to be with us for multiple years going into the future and if the clinicians aren’t protecting the budget for these patients that get missed, we’re going to focus on as we have been the emergency patients that come through the door,” he says. “But it’s always difficult for tertiary academic services because to keep up the skills of surgeons to maintain the quality of care, they do need to be managing waiting lists of booked patients. And so, I think across the country we’re going to be struggling with that across all tertiary services.”

Cairncross tells Spotlight that the project is just a temporary measure. In the long term, healthcare systems need to be fixed in order to address issues like surgical backlogs.

“The lesson, I suppose, is that these are temporising measures. We can do them, but fundamentally we need to fix the health system at a core, structural level. And we can’t work in isolation from the rest of the country because we are one health system and tertiary hospitals are only a part of that ecosystem,” she says. “The services at Groote Schuur Hospital, for example, cannot be sustained if the health systems from primary care to district health facilities, in urban and rural facilities, and across provinces are not supported and strengthened.”

The health system is at a precipice, according to Cairncross, and big academic hospitals need to be anchoring elective surgical services together with emergency services, as the problem with emergency services will only get bigger down the line if electives aren’t dealt with now.

“We know that postponed elective surgery just becomes emergency surgery over time, making cancelling elective surgery a false economy. We need to plan robust systems that ensure all types of surgical services are maintained,” she says.

“The strongest voice [in defence of the health system] is a conscious and motivated health workforce. So, where the nurses and doctors and managers are standing and defending patient services, they are supporting the health system,” she says. “I think this is an example of health workers standing up and saying, we can’t allow this deterioration in services. We’ve got to do more. We really want to tell the story, so that people can see it can be done.”

Republished from Spotlight under a Creative Commons 4.0 Licence.

Source: Spotlight